The first year studio in the Master of Landscape Architecture explores Hong Kong’s landscapes to critically classify them and understand them as a site strategy, to break them down to component parts and functions and to compare their spatial and material characteristics. As an introduction to modern and post-modern design methods, a central theme of the site analysis is the concept of space as the medium of design. Our interest is not to copy the past but to transform it through its critical re-appropriation and finding expression in the gaps, the edges, the overlaps, and the redundancies falling out of the process of urban development.
The project explores the fields between culturally, topographically, and ecologically distinct development areas in the Happy Valley Cemetery. As a linear site, the project also takes on notions of expanded roles for infrastructure and critiques the hegemony of engineering / maintenance practices in the construction of the city and its public spaces, and to consider interventionist strategies that construct habitable ground for both people and ecology.
